What is Bibliotherapy?

A quick search of the internet will deliver many different definitions for the term bibliotherapy, but in its most general sense, bibliotherapy is the use of books, reading and/or writing to provide a therapeutic benefit – to help someone.

There are many ways to ‘apply’ bibliotherapy techniques – one can self-prescribe, or one can be part of a group which reads and discusses the same text, or one can read a text as recommended by their doctor or mental health practitioner.

Click here to download our guide to the practical application of Running Over a Chinaman as a bibliotherapy tool.

Julie Jones and MoshPit Publishing believe that bibliotherapy has the potential to be as potent a tool as any other in the healing process and should be handled with as much respect as any medicine or topical application. It is our belief that a ‘course’ of bibliotherapy should be supervised by a person trained in mental health issues, not necessarily a psychiatrist or psychologist, but certainly someone with at least some formal counselling training.
Bibliotherapy can, at its most extreme, unlock a Pandora’s box of issues in the reader if that person has been suppressing or avoiding facing those issues. A lifetime’s hurt can surface and cause major distress without warning, and it is with this in mind that we believe that the client/patient should have a trained professional supervising their bibliotherapy, aware of what they are reading, why they might be reading it, and what it issues it could possibly raise.

While Running Over a Chinaman can be read simply as a story on its own merits, we strongly recommend that for it to be used in any course of bibliotherapy, that the reading or any group discussion is monitored or supervised by a trained counsellor, psychologist, psychiatrist or other mental health worker.

Having said all this, we also agree that bibliotherapy is not a replacement for the counselling process. It should be used as part of the process, not in place of it.

For more information on bibliotherapy, you may wish to have a look at the following websites. Please note that the definitions of bibliotherapy vary from site to site, and from organisation to organisation.

 

Running Over A Chinaman, Julie (Thredgold) Jones, ISBN 978-0-9806704-0-0 (paperback).

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